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Exploring Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
This free course introduces Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts (1941), with the aim of understanding how she writes about time, memory, and ideas about identity. It also considers why Woolf’s fiction is often considered difficult. Selected extracts from her essays on writing help to clarify some of these perceived difficulties, illuminating complex patterning and structure in this fictional account of an English village, on a day in June in 1939.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- identify Woolf’s ideas about time, memory and identity
- understand the role of innovation and experimentation in prose fiction
- demonstrate a developed ability to read dense poetic prose analytically.
First Published: 04/08/2016
Updated: 21/06/2018
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A brief yet pleasant course on VW's "Between the Acts". The exploration of language Woolf uses, as well as a quick historical background of her life, gives us an insight in many things one would ordinarily miss out when first reading (or at least not think about too much). I dare say this has helped me realise how complex literarture can be and that there is more to books than just the act of reading them. I particularly liked the discussion on Time and Continuity as well as Imagery and Identity.